The title of this post is a bit misleading. My wife and I aren’t really big on “Parent’s Day” celebrations: Years of Latter-day Saint “all women are mothers” (read: motherhood is the most important part of womanhood) Sunday services grated on us during our years of infertility, and even now that we are parents (and aren’t practicing Latter-day Saints—though my current denomination certainly isn’t immune from a cringeworthy celebration of parents either), it’s just not a thing we do.

So, so many wild things in this article. I grew up loving this hymn and had no idea it had roots in blackface minstrelsy. Hope the Church will take it out of its next hymnbook, but I’m not holding my breath. The real kicker is Brigham Young’s concern about blackface—not because it’s racist but because it’s degrading to white people.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been putting a lot of work into adjusting my online presence, a project that I expect to last through most of the summer. In dividing my website into distinct subareas and pivoting from a single Twitter account to a number of Mastodon accounts, I’m trying to do something about the context collapse that’s been keeping me from sharing some of the big things going on in my life lately.

Thanks to a recommendation from BoingBoing, I just finished reading a Business Insider article describing a recent video in which Marjorie Taylor Greene:

predicted that identifying as heterosexual will be a thing of the past within a period of less than 200 years thanks to LGBTQ-inclusive sex educators, who she called “trans terrorists.”

More specifically, Greene was quoted as saying that heterosexual extinction would come about “probably in about four or five generations.” Referrring to “generations” in the context of a purported heterosexual extinction felt familiar to me. In fact, as horribly queerphobic as Greene’s message was, she was actually more optimistic than Latter-day Saint General Authorities have been in the past.

Listening to The Aquabats tonight and remembering how I pegged the Mormon connection when I was first listening to them because of subtle allusions to food storage and pioneer hymns.

I suspect that there is nothing as damning in Mormon history as Mormons’ failure to own up to that history, and Jana’s writing here captures that nicely.

Reading about Mike Lee’s attempts to interfere with the election reminds me of the missionary companion who dreamed of rising high enough in the FBI to be ready to help Salt Lake carry out a coup if needed.

I have been meaning to read this for quite some time, as it is the first volume in the most recent official history of Community of Christ. I’m also looking forward to the next two volumes, since they cover history that I am not familiar with, but it was especially interesting to read a Community of Christ perspective on the 1830-1844 era.

I appreciated the frankness and openness of the volume—it’s impossible to imagine an LDS version of this book taking the same approach. As open as the Saints books are compared to previous takes on LDS history, they don’t compare to this. My only complain about the book is the sometimes-stilted writing and the seeming tangents—ti was sometimes hard to tell why particular subjects got the focus they did.

This was a bit of a slog sometimes—one of the reasons why it took me so long to read and why it didn’t get a full five hearts—but it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve read recently.

This is supposedly one of the great classics of Mormon fiction, though I hadn’t heard of it before BCC Press released a free ebook of it a few weeks ago. It is a frank but respectful tale of Mormon pioneers “settling” St. George in the mid-to-late 19th century. It is unflinching in its discussion of the difficulties of polygamy and the abuse of ecclesiastical leadership, but it is also reverent in its treatment of the pioneers’ commitments and beliefs.

Latest guest post on official blog of far right Gab platform could have been a Latter-day Saint General Conference sermon. Sure, rejecting truth and embracing evil sounds bad, but there are a lot of assumptions that need to be surfaced and interrogated about what both terms mean.

Lots of thoughts about this. As someone with an education PhD who teaches and researches outside traditionally education topics, I want to emphasize that the prevalence of education PhDs is a symptom, not the actual problem. In my teaching and research outside my home discipline, I work hard to learn the content and communities that I’m branching into. The disdain for those content and communities at BYU Religious Education is the real problem here and therefore what I’m really worried about. To channel Shulman, this is a context that values pedagogical knowledge at the expense of content knowledge; there are lots of academic departments out there that make the opposite mistake, but that doesn’t justify this approach either.

Remembering the time that the only person at church who understood my dissertation research was the one who worked for the state of Michigan doing social media surveillance of social justice movements.

Angry at myself tonight for not noticing spousal abuse perpetrated by someone I worked with regularly while it was happening. Angrier still at those I know who were aware of it and did nothing.

Bishop roulette makes for terrible public policy.

I am about a decade late to Joanna Brooks’s beautiful memoir, and I know I wouldn’t have appreciated it fully in 2012, but I am so, so glad to be reading it now.

You cannot understand online Mormonism without understanding Mormon feminism. The more I read, the clearer that becomes.

I am not sure what I was expecting when I started looking for Mormon* content on Gab, but “we should get the missionaries on this platform” wasn’t it.

Today I learned from first-hand experience that Latter-day Saint services aren’t the only ones with cringeworthy messages on Mother’s Day. 😤 Not sure whether that’s comforting or disappointing! 😜

I’m trying to succinctly describe a Latter-day Saint “solemn assembly” in an academic manuscript, and it’s a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.